Does gang membership pay? Illegal and legal earnings through emerging adulthood*

• Author: Jean Marie McGloin,David C. Pyrooz,Megan Bears Augustyn
• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12208
• Published date: 01 August 2019

Received: 10 April 2018 Revised: 10 January 2019 Accepted: 21 January 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9125.12208

ARTICLE

Does gang membership pay? Illegal and legal

earnings through emerging adulthood*

Megan Bears Augustyn1Jean Marie McGloin2David C. Pyrooz3

1Department of Criminal Justice, The

University of Texasat San Antonio

2Department of Criminology and Criminal

Justice, University of Maryland—College Park

3Department of Sociology, University of

Colorado, Boulder

Correspondence

MeganBears Augustyn, Department of Cr im-

inalJustice, The University of Texas at San

Antonio,4.220 Durango Building, 501 W.

Cesar ChavezBlvd., San Antonio, TX 78207.

Email:megan.augustyn@utsa.edu

*Additionalsupporting information

canbe found in the listing for this arti-

clein t he WileyOnline Library at

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/

crim.2019.57.issue-3/issuetoc.

Theaut horswould like to thank Christopher

Sullivanand Thomas Loughran for their

assistance.They are also grateful to Dr. David

McDowalland four anonymous reviewersfor

the helpful suggestions.This research relies on

data collected fromt he Pathwaysto Desistance

Study.Support and funding for the data collec-

tionwere provided by the Arizona Governor’s

JusticeCommission, the Centers for Disease

Control,the MacAr thur Foundation, NIDA

(R01DA 019697 05), NIJ (2008-IJ-CX-0023),

OJJDP(2005-JK-FX-K001), t he Pennsylva-

niaCommission on Cr ime & Delinquency,the

RobertWood Johnson Foundation, the William

PennFoundation, and the William T. Grant

Foundation.

Abstract

Gang membership is believed to impede success in the

legitimate economic market while simultaneously support-

ing success in the illegal market. Weextend the study of the

economic effects of gang membership by using a within-

and between-individual analytic design, decomposing gang

membership into multiple statuses (i.e., entering a gang,

continuously in a gang, leaving a gang, and inactive gang

membership), examining legal and illegal earnings simul-

taneously, and accounting for factors endogenous to gang

membership that may contribute to economic achievement.

By using panel data from 1,213 individuals who partici-

pated in the Pathways to Desistance Study to conduct a

multilevel path analysis, we find that active gang mem-

bership status is unrelated to legal earnings. Alternatively,

entering a gang is associated with increased illegal earn-

ings, attributable to changes in delinquent peers and drug

use, whereas leaving a gang has a direct relationship with

decreased illegal earnings. Our results indicate that the pos-

itive economic effectof gang membership (i.e., illegal earn-

ings and total earnings) is short-lived and that, on balance,

the sum of the gang membership experience does not “pay”

in terms of overall earnings.

KEYWORDS

criminal capital, earnings, gangs, multilevel structural equation model

Street gangs are viewed as one avenue to blunt the relegation of the urban underclass to the secondary

labor market (Hagedorn & Macon, 1988; Moore, 1991; Venkatesh & Levitt, 2000; Vigil, 1988).

452 © 2019 American Society of Criminology wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crim Criminology.2019;57:452–480.

AUGUSTYN ET AL.453

Scholars have portrayed gangs as the quintessential American enterprise of the informal economy,

particularly illicit goods (e.g., Padilla, 1992), positioned to compensate for economic and social

inequalities plaguing entire generations of inner-city youth. The findings from an emerging body of

quantitative research indicate preliminary support for this contention, with gang membership reported

to be associated with at least some illicit success, while seemingly impeding achievement in the

legitimate economy (e.g., Gilman, Hill, & Hawkins, 2014; Krohn, Ward, Thornberry, Lizotte, &

Chu, 2011).

This work is informative, but it would benefit from further consideration. First, despite the

fact that researchers have documented that gang members (and offenders more broadly) generate

earnings through both legal and illegal means (Decker & VanWinkle, 1996; Fagan & Freeman, 1999;

Levitt & Venkatesh, 2000), they have rarely studied both outcomes simultaneously (cf. Carvalho &

Soares, 2016; Uggen & Thompson, 2003). Ideally, one should model both legal and illegal earnings

to determine whether being in a gang, on balance, pays or limits financial dividends. Second,

researchers almost always have adopted a between-persons approach using a binary, static measure

of gang membership—that is, it compares “ever” gang members with “never” gang members. This

approach is problematic because conducting such analyses may pool together periods of active

and nonactive gang status among members or tap into an underlying difference between those

individuals who join gangs and those who do not. The fact that gang membership is dynamic (e.g.,

Pyrooz, Sweeten, & Piquero, 2013) in ways that may be related to earnings is ignored with this

method. Capturing gang entrance, continuity, and exit could provide important insight into the

contours of gang membership’s relationship with earnings. It, therefore, would be beneficial to

use a within-persons analysis to account for the fluid contours of gang membership to capture the

more nuanced relationship between gang status and earnings. Finally, scholars tend not to address

problems of simultaneity in their studies as they do not account for factors endogenous to gang

membership. To be clear, being in a gang may affect earnings through various factors—for example,

criminal and prosocial capital and routine activities—that are known to be associated with financial

success. Specifying such factors may provideinsight into t he mechanismslinking gang membership to

earnings.

In this study, we address these voids by examining legal and illegal earnings associated with gang

membership status using data from the Pathways to Desistance study. This sample of serious offend-

ers in Philadelphia, PA, and Maricopa County, AZ, was interviewed about involvement in gangs and

economic activity 11 times over a 7-year period from late adolescence through emerging adulthood

(Mulvey & Schubert, 2012). The panel nature of the data also offers the opportunity to leverage a

within-individual analysis estimated through a multilevel structural equation modeling framework. In

doing so, we differentiate between periods when a subject entered a gang, wascontinuously active in a

gang, and left a gang, offering a more nuanced sense of “active gang status” in comparison with earn-

ings in periods of nonactive membership. Finally, the data are rich and contain information on several

factors that are endogenous to gang membership, which allows for an improved understanding of the

relationship between gang membership and economic achievement.

1GANG MEMBERSHIP AND ECONOMIC ACHIEVEMENT

When introducing the concept of “criminal embeddedness,” Hagan (1993, pp. 469–473) drew heavily

on gang ethnographies (e.g., Moore, 1991; Padilla, 1992; Sullivan, 1989) to illustrate its dimensions

and linkages to the legitimate and illicit labor markets. Gang membership arguably personifies Hagan’s

(1993) assertion that belonging to criminal networks constrains success in the legitimate labor market